Friday, January 04, 2008

The Iowa Crocuses

#342

The election is over, now we can all go back to normal. Oh. Wait, wasn't the election, it just seems like it. It's the Iowa crocuses, where people get together and quilt and tat and tell the rest of the country who the next President of the United States will be. Or at least who the contestants will be. Here's a state that in no way is a microcosm of America, that has relatively little electoral clout and hardly enough electricity to run all the cable TV and satellite news trucks that flood in once every four years, telling the future for the rest of us. News Satellites. Crystal balls in space.

The best thing you can say about the whole sorry mess is that a goofy, bass playing mini-state governor is scaring hell out of the neo-con dominated Republican Party. If you look at the guy's record, you see a bunch of actions and policies most of which could easily be accepted by a normal American. Except too much New Testament and not enough foreign policy. The neos and the reaganauts thought they had the party in a pin fall, or, at the very least, a headlock. Apparently not. This will make the Think tank crowd crazy. They'll be up on the tube for the next six months frothing and drooling about Iraq and releasing criminals and coddling illegals and how their hard work has been betrayed by an ungrateful voting public. Democracy goes just so far, after all. At least when your guys lose.

The second best thing you can say about the whole sorry mess is that the arrogant and detached Hillary Clinton got whumped. She managed a show (as in win-place-show,) but that's not good enough. And someone's sure to whine about how she lost because she's a woman. That ain't so. There are roughly 150-million women in America, and plenty of 'em are qualified to be President. Golda Meir she's not.

In hindsight, Obama's win on the Democratic Party side is not surprising. He's young and articulate, and unlike Edwards, he shows little sign of down-spiraling into another hysterical Howard Dean. Further, there aren't enough African Americans in Iowa to get a decent "there goes the neighborhood" movement going among the state's white population. That he's been in the US Senate for something like 20 minutes doesn't seem to matter much, at least not yet.

Poor Governor Richardson and Senator Biden, probably the best qualified of this lot. Guys like that rarely stand a chance. Of course, even though it seems that this campaign started before the invention of the wheel, it's only just now really getting rolling.

By the time this all ends, our minds will be totally numbed and our eyes totally glazed over. Or we'll feel like we're six feet under, pushing up crocuses.